The People is our section for opinions and perspectives. Submit your opinion to info@thetriibe.com.
A few weeks ago, I went to a bar in Chicago’s West Loop for a friend’s birthday celebration. A group of us gathered as the sun set on a Friday evening and were surprised to find the place full of people who had come to watch the U.S. vs. Paraguay World Cup match. While we waited to be seated, the United States’ National Anthem played, and the bar filled with the sound of patrons, hand over heart, singing along. As I listened to the Anthem and the “USA!” chants that followed, my chest tightened, and a wave of fear shot through me. I began to hope that my presence would not be seen as disruptive in the overwhelmingly white crowd. I walked unsteadily to our group’s dinner table, shoving down my feelings and smiling my way through our meal.
I am a 23-year-old Black man, and though my family’s story is as American as apple pie, I still do not know how to relate to this country. The 1870 Census lists my maternal great-great-great-grandparents as farmers living in rural Mississippi and no doubt working land they had been forced to cultivate a few years earlier as enslaved people. My great-grandmother, with only an eighth-grade education, left Mississippi in 1965 for the promised prosperity of Chicago. She toiled in a factory on the North Side, making car headlights so that my grandmother could attend college. My grandmother then raised my mother in the North Lawndale and Austin neighborhoods as the disinvestment of the 1980s hollowed out those neighborhoods. My mother made the hours-long commute to Lane Tech, a magnet public school on the North Side, on the bet that a good education would change her life. It did, and she has spent her career serving her hometown as a city government employee.
I am the culmination of this long journey of social and economic mobility. From being raised by a single mother in Austin to having a Yale degree and a full scholarship to a top law school, I represent a kind of American Dream — an embodiment of the rule that hard work yields success in this country. Sometimes I am asked to share my journey with others. The requests are well-meaning, but in them I also feel a gentle nudge to lean into this narrative, to make the case for this country as a place that, though not without difficulty, can yield to the will of an educated, determined Black person. That we can make a place for ourselves here. But despite my story, I find deep discomfort with that narrative, and in its absence, I realize I do not know what to make of my Americanness.
As a child, my family celebrated the Fourth of July, and there was an un-selfconscious appreciation for this country that ran through our backyard barbecues. It was simple, not overstated, and almost axiomatic: we were American, and that was a good thing. Our gentle appreciation was manifest in red, white, and blue swimwear, and in cheap flag-themed paper cutlery we purchased from Jewel without much thought. Growing up inevitably complicated things for me. The nation reckoned more publicly with race in my adolescent years –– Black Lives Matter garnered national attention, and Donald J. Trump ascended to the White House for the first time following the 2016 election –– and there were also more personal moments that placed me at a distance from America.
I was educated in predominantly white spaces, and though that marked my ascent through the American education system, it also made clear the difference in my relationship with my country and that of my peers. Theirs was uncomplicated. America as a beacon of morality, always in the process of bending that great arc towards justice. The nation had welcomed them and their forefathers in that spirit, promising the kind of shining opportunity no other nation could. And how beautiful it was, to have full freedom, to be given an unconditional chance to grab greatness and knit your name into America’s tapestry alongside the giants that shaped this beloved land, their land. Wasn’t that worth celebrating with flags and fireworks, worth defending with every effort we could muster?
My relationship was hope in a yet unfulfilled promise.
It was pride in my family’s efforts to fashion a good life for themselves here, shot through with the knowledge that those efforts faced concerted opposition from this country’s leaders. It was conviction in the American values of freedom, justice, and equality, and also knowledge that the lives of my peers and I reflected the opposite. It was love for America as an idea cast against the backdrop of my great-grandmother’s landing in a redlined Chicago neighborhood during the Great Migration, my mother’s education amidst the devastation of the War on Drugs in the 1980s, and my coming of age in the 2010s while watching cops kill Black people through an iPhone screen. Those truths, when presented to my white peers in my essays as a columnist for my school newspaper, were disquieting. The presentation disrupted the grand myth-making project of this nation, making my presence in elite spaces look more like an exception than a rule.
Their America was pristine. Mine had blood on its hands.
When I took pains to point that out, I was met with disbelief and exasperation. I wrote an essay about the 2021 U.S. Capitol insurrection and had a college classmate balk at my “audacity” in suggesting this country has always been violent. I criticized my university and how it, much like American society, hoarded wealth and harmed Black people, and was met with anger. Among the outcry was frequently the suggestion that I simply be grateful for the gifts the university, and America, had given me. I grew to resent my American identity. I saw claiming the country as my own as also claiming the country to be above critique, as accepting the belief that this nation was a faultless beacon of righteousness in the world.
Rejecting that identity offered promise. It was the recognition that a new value system, a new country, needed to be built. But I knew I did not have another country to call home. My traditions did not have clear roots elsewhere, and so to turn away from my American identity would have been to deny a truth about my upbringing and the way I view the world.
I am an American. Through and through. And yet because I am Black, I stand as physical proof that the story the country tells about itself is a lie. That myth does not belong to me. Nor do this country’s crimes. But I am still an American, and because of that simultaneous fortune and misfortune, I have to make meaning out of belonging to a country hostile to my existence.
In earlier years, that meaning came from faith in the founding ideals. Today, as the country slips into autocracy, as it once again distorts and perverts justice and equality, I wrestle with whether I can still look to that faith for meaning. I wrestle with whether to commit to the project of recovering my country from this horrible wreckage. I wonder what it means to honor the American inheritance conferred by my ancestors, paid for with blood-red hands that picked pristine white cotton underneath a relentless blue sky. I do not know. But I know I am tethered to this soil, and I cannot escape that.
In 2024, when I was living in Washington, D.C., I went down to the National Mall to see the Fourth of July fireworks with friends. We grabbed a seat on the manicured grass just under the Washington Monument, amidst a crowd of observers. Caked in sweat from a day in D.C.’s swampy heat, we watched the sun set behind the reflecting pool and Lincoln Memorial, sending streaks of orange and purple through the clouds. Then the fireworks came. They burst against the darkening sky, and as they did, I felt a sort of pride well up in me. While the fireworks crackled in the air, their ashen remains drifted slowly towards us and the crowd. I felt a tightness in my chest, like I was not supposed to be there. Resisting that feeling, I smiled at my friends and sank into the moment, watching brilliant fireworks illuminate that dark blue sky.
